Episode 231: Multiple Perspectives, or, Seeing the Same Thing in Different Ways

This is another episode in our year-long series about the skills of historical thinking, and today our focus is on multiple perspectives. Putting it in the form of a question, it’s when a historian asks herself How might others plausibly interpret this evidence differently?  To do that, we must consider more than one point of view, and then either refute or concede objections to our argument. The theme of “multiple perspectives” takes us into a strange and interesting landscape where history, logic, phenomenology, and ethics meet—and hopefully assist one another. Touring that landscape with me today are two frequent guests of the podcast. Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. Her last appearance on the podcast was in January when she talked about her most recent book Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution. Bob Elder is Associate Professor of History at Baylor University, and we most recenlty talked about his book Calhoun, American Heretic. It should be noted that neither of them are from South Carolina.